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Comment by ransford | Hacker News Reader

Feynman mentions the physicist Julian Webb in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" [1]. The staff at Oak Ridge were generally kept in the dark about their role in the Manhattan Project, including the fact that the stuff they were producing (purified uranium isotopes) was extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Oppenheimer tasked Feynman with ensuring the integrity of the supply chain and sent Feynman to Oak Ridge for a frank safety discussion with the "big shots," and apparently Oppenheimer knew Webb to be technically capable enough to trust with the technical implications.

Feynman doesn't say what, if anything, he told Webb, but it's an interesting backstory -- it's possible Webb knew more than this article suggests.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=...

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Offtopic, but a couple pages later is the most memorable passage of the whole book to me, a software engineer:

(about setting up the IBM machines to perform calculations for the Manhattan Project)

"Well, Mr Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. [...] After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly-- while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arctangent X [...] Absolutely useless! We had tables of arc-tangents. But you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease-- the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease."

I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease.

Do you know the calculator hacking community? Graphing calculators like TI-84 are commonly used in American math classes, and they are reasonably powerful general purpose computers. So the hacking community started because a bunch of highschoolers are bored enough studying math at school, and discovered programming. First it was BASIC, then Z80 assembly, and later some even started creating their own programming environment on the calculator, rediscovered many high-performance graphics hacks used by early video games. After graduating from highschools, those who still have interests in calculators have developed open source toolchains, programming languages and operating systems in college for calculator development.

However, when Texas Instruments released TI-Nspire CX, it was boycotted by the vast majority members from the hacking community because the system is locked down.

Some teachers and parents commented,

> "one thing that [...] is NOT wrong is TI's refusal to make the NSpire a platform for Doom or Quake or any other distraction that kids enjoy. These things may be fun, but they aren't about learning math"

I think it describes the same phenomenon.

And then people are surprised kids hate school and don't learn a thing.

Tinkering, fun, and being free to follow a stupid idea down a rabbit hole is how people learn and internalize stuff.

I was one of these people.

In middle school, a teacher showed us how to make a pythagorean theorem program, and I immediately saw the potential. When asked if it were possible to make a quadratic equation program, the teacher told me it couldn't be done. I had one written by the following day's math class, and I was hooked.

By high school, I was writing actual graphical games for the TI. I even taught friends so they could help contribute.

If it weren't for that freedom to explore, I would never have even gotten into software. And while pursuing my degree, I came to realize that my friends and I had "invented" some core programming concepts, things like hashing and basic cryptography (so no one would steal our game assets).

This was me. I was actually packing for a move today when I found an old hard drive that has a backup of my homedir on my family's old win98 machine which has all my old BASIC games and programs. At the time I channeled all my boredom into that thing and it led me on a path towards computer programming.

There was a really vibrant community on IRC and ticalc.org, which I was fortunate to find, because it was one of the only programming communities I know of at the time filled with people around my same age; it honestly changed my life. I wouldn't be where I am today without having found it.

"but they aren't about learning math"

Hmmmmmmmmmm

Yeah, exactly.

By 15yo, I was knee-deep in trying to make my own games. Final exams came, after which everyone's chatting about how they solved the math questions. "It was simple, I've used Pythagorean theorem", they'd say, and I rolled my eyes wondering how that applies. I said, "it was simple, I've used the formula for the length of a 2D vector, which is also the same for the distance between two points". They rolled their eyes wondering what I was talking about.

(It did click for me a couple moments later that the cool thing I've learned for my game programming goals was, in fact, derived from the Pythagorean theorem.)

That's a beautiful quote, thank you for sharing! It's also how I acquired most of the skills that today define my career. I studied physics and procrastinated with code, and to a lesser extent with studying computer science, extensively. Today I work on Google's technical infrastructure. I suspect that this is not at all an unusual turn of events amongst readers here.

> I suspect that this is not at all an unusual turn of events amongst readers here.

Definitely not. On large scale, I own most of my career to that disease. On small scale, pretty much every job I got could be attributed to something that I learned through procrastination a year or two earlier.

Absolutely the case for me too.

Switched courses to design because my chemistry tutor kept telling me off for doodling on my notes. Got into web development was because I was bored at work and started learning HTML.

Trouble is, it means that whatever I’m doing is what I should be doing some point in the future, not what I actually need to do right now...

I have another variant of this: I get code rage (which I can easily self diagnose after the fact as being simply NIH in most cases). So whenever I got stuck debugging a bunch of spaghetti, I'd go look for distractions. But because at this point, that was in a professional setting and no longer just my target for procrastination, I was looking for professionally valid distractions. So I became a team lead/manager that way. One thing leads to another and here I am. Turns out I liked that career, too.

>>I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease.

It is a disease in the same way that a painter or writer has a disease where he cannot stop painting or writing.

Frankly, I think those that have it should count themselves among the lucky ones.

I think he was talking about procrasti-coding. “Should be working on X, but really captivated by a well-defined and elegant Z instead”

Printing arctan tables sounds like a seminal example of a Advent of Code kind of problem, which have been known to nerd snipe countless programmers.

Exactly. It's kind of related to yak-shaving, except the task you're spending time on may not at all be related to the one you should be focusing on.

I've more than once caught myself lovingly perfecting some utility script when, really, I had some more important stuff I should've been focusing on.

The reason, of course, is that I'm getting that rewarding feeling of accomplishment on the script, when I know the feeling will be further out (or unattainable) on the Main Task.

Related context — after Frankel was kicked out of government work for political incorrectness in the 1950s, he designed the LGP-30 (the computer Mel Kaye famously programmed) and the forgotten Smith-Corona Marchant Cogito 240SR, on which project Tom Osborne was inspired to develop what eventually became the HP 9100, the foundation of the line of all of HP's programmable RPN calculators, and in some sense one of the first personal computers, shipping in 1968: http://www.hp9825.com/html/the_9100_project.html

I'm 90% disease, 10% real work.

Edit: But the 10% real work, I work real real hard :)

I wonder if anybody has ever tried to do a study on where "peak efficiency" lies on this spectrum (i.e. how much do you need to allow people to goof around, such that the subset of their time they spend on being productive yield the most value).

Well, the good thing is that generally that 90% of disease can make that real work much more efficient. After a few years of 90% disease, you're probably able to knock out the equivalent of at least 60%-80% of real work in just that 10% of time.

Very familiar with that disease. I admire people who have immunity.

Wasn't that the trip where Feynman discovered they were stacking radioactive materials against the same wall in two storage rooms and were in danger of achieving criticality?

If you review the safety and environmental procedures and precautions for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, and the US military and federal government in general, they were rather lax through the 70s or 90s depending on your perspective. The scientists at Los Alamos hardly seemed to understand how dangerous are the chemicals they worked with - all of the wastewater was dumped untreated into the pond in the center of town until 1962. Same with all the water from the world’s first plutonium milling facility - dumped untreated into the desert. That created a pollutant plume ~550 feet deep. All of the waste from the Manhattan project (plutonium, uranium, beryllium, lead, PCBs, solvents, radioactive rubble of all sorts) was put into unlined landfills in Los Alamos with little documentation. This happens to be upstream from 90% of the population of New Mexico, on sandy soils 2-5 miles from the largest river in the region.

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